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5:25
The fastest way to misunderstand Jesus is to read Him in fragments. Today’s Field Notes takes one sentence from Matthew 5:17 and lets it rebuild the whole picture: Jesus does not come to abolish the law and the prophets, He comes to fulfill them. That means the Old Testament is not a wrecked building behind us, and God’s standards are not disposable just because grace is real.
We walk through how the Sermon on the Mount actually flows, from the Beatitudes to salt and light to Jesus addressing God’s law as one connected message. Along the way, we talk about what went wrong in the first century when religious leaders weaponized the law, stacking extra rules on people while ignoring those same standards themselves. No wonder many assumed the Messiah would show up and erase the rulebook entirely.
Then we slow down on Jesus’ wording. “Abolish” carries the idea of tearing a building down to its foundation, and Jesus says that is not what He’s doing. Instead, He fulfills the law, correcting twisted legalism and perfectly meeting the holy standard we cannot reach on our own. That shifts repentance from earning favor to trusting God’s design for life, and it turns obedience into a response to faith, not a desperate attempt to measure up.
Try the challenge we give at the end: read Matthew 5–7 in one sitting and ask God to change your lens. If this helped you, subscribe, share it with a friend who feels stuck between legalism and a free pass, and leave a review so more people can find Field Notes.
Good morning and welcome to Field Notes, a five-day devo from right here at Mission Scent. Remember, you can always hear the latest sermon at missionscent.org forward slash church or wherever you listen to podcasts. Field Notes is taking daily discipleship by breaking down the sermon into bite-sized one-step pieces so that we continue discipleship throughout the week. Let's jump into it. Good morning. Happy Monday. Hope you're ready to jump into a new week. It is Labor Day. So hopefully you are taking a rest from your labor.
Now let's jump into day one, tearing down verse fulfilling. Our scripture reference today is from Matthew 5, 17. Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets. I have not come to abolish them, but to fulfill them.
When we read the Bible today, we often chop it up into disconnected ideas because of chapter and verse numbers, which, mind you, weren't even added until the 1300s. But because of this, we miss the flow of Jesus' teaching. See, in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus moves seamlessly from the Beatitudes into addressing God's law. He goes from, hey, here is what my followers were looked like. Because you look like this, you're going to be the salt of the earth, the light of the world. And then he gets into this abolishing the law. And so often we look at these things as separate individual things, but we need to remember that in Jesus' sermon, this is all one long interconnected sermon.
See, in the first century, the religious leaders had weaponized the law, making it an unbearable weight on the people. In fact, they were, Jesus will later teach, that they were making rules and laws that they themselves did not follow. Kind of hypocritical, hence where they get that name from, right? But naturally, when this new Messiah comes on the scene and Jesus is preaching grace and mercy, the assumption of the people was that he was going to wipe out the Old Testament rules completely so that people could live however they wanted to.
But Jesus uses the specific building term here for abolish. In Greek, it's katalo, which means to tear a building down to its very foundations. But Jesus is clarifying that he's not bringing a wrecking ball to the foundation of God's truth. The Old Testament is still going to stand. The law and the prophets are still standing there, that he's not doing away with them, but he's clarifying that he instead has come to fulfill them, to correct our twisted legalistic interpretations and to perfectly meet the holy standard that we are fundamentally incapable of reaching on our own. See, and that's where we run into a
lot of this. Jesus isn't sitting here going, hey, because of mercy, throw out all of the standards. Although that is true, and although you will never outsen the cross, that is not Jesus' main point here today. See, too many of us, we get wrapped up in the do's and the don'ts, and we focus entirely on our sin. And I'm not saying that we do not need repentance. We a hundred percent do, but not because we're going to gain favor in God's eyes. We need repentance because God designed life and therefore gets to define how it should be lived. See, when you define it, you design it. Backwards. When you design it, you define it. It's Monday morning. What what do you want me to say? And what God is doing is He's sitting here and He's going, I didn't come to get rid of this. The standard is still the standard, it doesn't change. I came to fulfill what you could not. So I can take your place, so I can go to the cross. And what we have to do is we have to trust that. We have to believe in that. And that means putting our faith in that. More than believing these words are true. But because I believe this is true, I will do.
So today, are you viewing God's standards as a crushing weight that you have to carry? Or are you looking for a free pass to ignore them entirely? See, the challenge today is to adjust our lens. Read Matthew 5 through 7 in one sitting, ignoring the chapter breaks, ignoring the different verses, and ask God to help you see his commands as a beautiful foundation that Jesus has already perfectly fulfilled on your behalf. Hope you have a great Monday, and we can't wait to see you Tuesday morning right here on Field Notes.
